Late And Soon

The novels of Per Petterson.

Petterson writes sentences that alternate realism and lyricism and, like his heroes, are hard to hold on to and yet hard to let go of.Credit Photograph by Jacob Aue Sobol / Magnum

I have a friend, a writer, who became so obsessed by the Norwegian novelist Per Petterson’s “I Curse the River of Time” that he copied it out, word for word—perhaps hoping that his pure replica might unlock the secrets of that mysterious book, with its curling form and drifting sentences. When he told me this, I had not read anything by Petterson. But how could anyone resist such a recommendation? As soon as I opened “I Curse the River of Time” (one of the great titles), I understood the dementing lure. Maybe my friend was trying to get his head, and his pen, around a sentence like this one. The thirty-seven-year-old narrator, Arvid Jansen, recalls family reunions:

My father’s brothers with their wives did call on rare occasions and every other Christmas my mother’s childless sister came up from Copenhagen acting upper class with her husband who worked in a firm importing French cars and was the creepy owner of an 8mm camera he used for all kinds of things, and my grandparents would also come, their palms worn and hard, from another, more puritanical town in the same country, in the same fashion, by ferry, grey hair, grey clothes, standing windswept and grey on the quay waiting for my father to come down along Trondhjemsveien in a rare taxi to pick them up and sometimes I, too, was in that taxi and they looked so small next to their big suitcases.

Or perhaps he was trying to crack the movement of a passage like this one. The narrator recalls how fond he and his mother were of Erich Maria Remarque’s novel “Arch of Triumph,” and how the novel’s heroes were always drinking Calvados:

We said to each other, my mother and I, wouldn’t it be great one day to taste this liquor; a liquid that for me turned into the true magic potion, a golden nectar flowing through Remarque’s novel and on in multiple streams, acquiring a strange, powerful significance, and that, of course, because it was unobtainable, because they only sold one single brand at the state monopoly and it was way beyond my means. But in Arch of Triumph they were forever ordering Calvados, Boris and Ravic, the two friends in the book who were refugees from Stalin and Hitler respectively, in Paris in the years before the German occupation, and it was Armageddon then, on all fronts, both back and forth in time, and the conversations they had about life left the same bitter taste in my mouth as singing the hymn, which goes: Thank you for memories, thank you for hope, thank you Oh Lord for the bitter gift of pain, which in fact I did at a funeral not long ago. Sing that hymn.

Readers who know only Petterson’s most successful (also more straightforward and less interesting) novel, “Out Stealing Horses,” which won many prizes when it appeared in English translation, in 2005, might be surprised to encounter these run-on sentences, tripping over their own dropped clauses, pricked with intermittence, properly punctuated but curiously unpunctual.

It is hard to catch the rhythm of their sure-footed dalliance. (“I Curse the River of Time” was translated by Charlotte Barslund, with the help of Petterson.) In the first passage, what is strange is not just the way the function of that linking “and” changes (sometimes “and” is used to connect sequential details; sometimes it is used to shift from one temporality to another) but also the way that information expands and contracts. We go from the precision and banality of the uncle with his 8-mm. camera to the almost placeless, blurred lyricism about the grey grandparents from an unnamed but “more puritanical town . . . standing windswept and grey on the quay.” There is something wonderful about the passionate reality with which, in the second excerpt, the narrator invests a liquid that is at first fictional but which becomes absolutely alive, a golden nectar flowing “in multiple streams.” Notice, too, that, in a spirit of free association, the narrator’s thoughts about the book are bound up with taste: golden Calvados to begin with, and then the bitter taste of the novel, which leads to the “bitter gift of pain” mentioned in the old hymn, and on to the “bitter gift” of the funeral.

How many people think like this? Probably as many as think like Leopold Bloom or Mrs. Ramsay or one of David Foster Wallace’s characters. Petterson is remarkably gifted at capturing not so much randomness or irrelevance (habitual catchments of the stream of consciousness) as the staggered distances of memory: one detail seems near at hand, while another can be seen only cloudily; one mental picture seems small, while another seems portentous. Yet everything is jumbled in the recollection, because the most proximate memory may be the least important, the portentous detail relatively trivial. Petterson’s interest is pictorial and spatial rather than logical and interrogative. His sentences yearn to fly away into poetry; it is rare to find prose at once so exact and so vague. Yet Petterson is novelistically acute about human motive and self-deception. In both passages, our needy, self-involved narrator hovers over his memories, and finally pokes his way back into the narrative with local assertions of self: “and sometimes I, too, was in that taxi”; “which in fact I did at a funeral not long ago.”

Arvid Jansen is a familiar Petterson character, and “I Curse the River of Time” could be the title of several of Petterson’s novels. Arvid’s life is drifting, like the sentences he voices, moving between banal failure and bottomless losses. His younger brother died six years ago, and his mother is dying of stomach cancer; he is on the verge of a divorce, and his career seems stalled. Arvid is wounded and childish, desperate for reassurance from his mother, anxiously competitive with his brothers, dead and alive. When, at one moment, his mother tells him that not a day goes by without her thinking of his dead brother, he cannot help himself and blurts out the kind of complaint that any seventeen-year-old, let alone a thirty-seven-year-old, might be abashed to utter:

“You don’t think about me every day,” I said.

“No,” she said. “Why should I?”

“No, why should you . . . I don’t think about you every day, either.” But that was not true, so I said, “Yes, I do.”

“That’s not necessary,” she said with her back to me.

“Yes it is,” I said.

When his mother decides to return for a few days to the place on the Danish coast where she grew up, Arvid follows her, seeking a quality of communication and commendation that he has clearly never received from either of his parents. In Denmark, at the beach house, he is superfluous, pitiful, chaotic. He sleeps on the sofa, wears his father’s old clothes, drinks too much, falls and bangs his head, fights in a bar, and cuts down a tree that has blocked the view from the house, mainly because he wants to prove to his mother that he can do something his father failed to do. He moves obsessively over his memories, and the novel alternates between the present time in Denmark and Arvid’s recollections. He tells us about his youth as a Communist activist, about his factory work as a printer, and about the death of his brother. He can’t shake the sense that his mother turned away from him when, fired up with ideas about the nobility of work and the power of the proletariat, he told her that he was leaving college and getting a job. She slapped him, and called him an idiot, and, ever since, he has felt that a gulf, “like the Rio Grande,” came between them, and “she didn’t like me anymore, did not want me.”

Most of Petterson’s protagonists are blighted by the deaths of siblings and the deaths or disappearance of parents; most of them are separated from partners or spouses, or are otherwise alone. The forty-three-year-old narrator of “In the Wake,” an earlier novel that seems related to “I Curse the River of Time” (“In the Wake” appeared in Norwegian in 2000, eight years before “I Curse”), is also named Arvid, and shares several elements with his later incarnation, including a leftist youth and an inclination to drift and despair. Six years before the start of the novel, Arvid lost his parents and two brothers in a ferry accident; his life, and that of his surviving brother, has been spent “in the wake” of that disaster. The prose of “In the Wake” is not as complex as that of the later book, but it has the same strange abysmal openings, moments when temporality seems to crumble and the narrator peers over the brink of deep distances. Arvid remembers returning, in April, with his elder brother, from the site of the accident in Denmark, “in a borrowed van we had far from emptied, and it was still a spring of some kind, the longest ever. He went off to his life, and I went off to mine, and then silence fell. I do not know what happened. I do not know what didn’t happen. . . . We did not fly any more, we did not float any more. We were on our way to the bottom, but we did not see that.” The narrator of “Out Stealing Horses,” Trond Sander, is even more isolated: he lives alone in a cottage in the far east of Norway. He is sixty-seven, and hopes this will be his final home. Three years earlier, he lost his wife in a car accident that he narrowly survived. He appears largely estranged from his daughters. The female narrator of “To Siberia” (known only as Sistermine by her elder brother) spends the last third of the novel drifting, waiting for news of her brother, who, we learn, has died in Morocco: “The days go by, and I go with them, but I do not count them. I wait. It is a flowing feeling.”

One source for the sense of hollow belatedness in Petterson’s work is likely the disaster that occurred in April, 1990, when the Oslo-to-Frederikshavn ferry caught fire, killing a hundred and fifty-nine people, including Petterson’s parents, his brother, and his nephew. In an interview with James Campbell, in the Guardian, he said that his mother had just finished reading his first novel (published in 1989), and had given her verdict: “Well, I hope the next one won’t be that childish.” The next weekend, she was dead. Arvid’s mother in “I Curse the River of Time” has a similar tartness, and all the fiction by Petterson that has been translated into English—which is to say, everything published after 1990—lives in a hanging, unresolved world, as if a reply had been voiced but eternally finds no audience.

Petterson’s adult protagonists have intense, complex, anxious relations with the past. Their childhoods are flagrantly vivid to them. Arvid remembers longing for his childhood “with such teeth-grinding intensity that I almost frightened myself.” In Petterson’s work, the past ghosts its way back into the present with spectral power. It is always clutching at life, pulling at the sleeve of the present. Often, his sentences shift from present to past, mid-flow, without warning. But there is also joy in the natural and easy access that the novelist seems to have to the recollected stories and pungencies of childhood. Walking through a square in Oslo easily brings back, for Arvid Jansen, a remembered topography and, especially, the cinema, Ringen Kino: “Across the square towards the petrol station there were neon signs too, and to the right or the left, depending on which way you came, lay Ringen Kino with its glowing stripes of red neon above the entrance from Trondhjemsveien, on the same side as the bookshop, but after the film you would come out, half-blind, into Tromsøgata right opposite Bergersen’s café.” Likewise, Trond Sander spends much of “Out Stealing Horses” floating in retrospect, both loving and alienated. He remembers the labor of mowing, and of chopping and stacking wood, in the summer of 1948, and these beautifully rendered scenes (in Anne Born’s translation) have the heavy sensuous immediacy of harvesting in Tolstoy and Hardy: “I smelled of resin, my clothes smelled, and my hair smelled, and my skin smelled of resin when I lay in my bed at night. I went to sleep with it and woke up with it and it stayed with me all the day long. I was forest.”

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You do not have to be middle-aged, in Petterson’s fiction, to look back at childhood. Here an eighteen-year-old boy from Oslo recalls his childhood in the countryside, and the memories, even the painful ones, purl into running ecstasies:

I have not forgotten the cornfields in autumn, or Lake Aurtjern in July or the apple tree outside my window, and all I had to do was reach out and pick an apple, or the long gravel road where Siri Skirt used to walk and show her bottom for two ten øre coins, and she wasn’t wearing anything underneath, and once I was allowed to walk round twice while she held her skirt up under her chin; or the rafting holiday on Lake Hurdal. My father forced me to come with him, and made me pull up a pike that scared me witless, and when I refused, he hit me in the face, and then I hammered a nail into my foot, and we were forced to go home.

The teen-ager who remembers these country delights is Audun Sletten, the narrator of “It’s Fine by Me” (Graywolf; translated by Don Bartlett), which appears now for the first time in English, but which is Petterson’s second novel, published in Norway in 1992. Audun is a working-class Oslo boy, and not without his troubles. A year ago, his brother drove a car into a river and drowned. His parents are separated; his father, whom he last saw five years ago, has been violent and abusive. Yet “It’s Fine by Me” is notable, especially given its proximity to Petterson’s own family tragedy, for the freshness and optimism of its portrait of Audun’s youth. The envelope of hardship cannot hold the arrow of life: Petterson’s youthful novel is an openhearted bildungsroman, narrated in a first-person present tense, and we see Audun making his way, vigorous with books and politics and music, and full of determination to write. It is 1970, and Audun and his school friend Arvid (Petterson’s favorite name makes an early appearance here) share everything. Jimi Hendrix has just died. The Vietnam War shapes the political discourse. Arvid is a member of the National Liberation Group at school, doing battle with the Young Conservatives, while Audun is an engaged voyeur: “I am a passive member, I have too many other things on my mind.” Arvid, who comes from a more bookish household, recommends books like Jan Myrdal’s “Confessions of a Disloyal European”: “He hands me the book, and I read the page, and the next; it’s pure, concise writing about things that you walk around turning over in your mind. I have to have this book, there is something different here, open, bold.” Certain writers—Hemingway, London, Gorky, Tolstoy—are charged with significance for the boys. Audun writes in a notebook that he likes to think is similar to one used by Hemingway in “A Moveable Feast.” Arvid’s father has a recommendation of his own:

“Read this one, boys, then perhaps you’ll understand what it’s like to toil and sweat for the things you want!” Arvid groaned, but I read the book, and this is the third time now. It is called Martin Eden and was written by Jack London. I had read The Call of the Wild and The Sea Wolf, almost everyone we know has read them, but only Arvid and I have read Martin Eden, and we keep it to ourselves.

There is something about this book, and there is something about his struggle, and as soon as I had read it I knew I wanted to be a writer, and if I didn’t make it, I would be an unhappy person.

Like Arvid Jansen in “I Curse the River of Time,” Audun decides that he must leave school and get a job; he, too, works as a press operator in a factory that prints, among other things, a glossy magazine. There are vivid, energetic sketches of life on the factory floor, including a gruesomely exact scene in which one of the workers loses three fingers from his left hand. Even this witnessed horror cannot quite dim Audun’s rebellious vivacity, which sees the world as palpable and there for the taking—Audun is what Robert Lowell once called, in a description of a girl in a Vermeer, “solid with yearning”: “From the large windows up under the ceiling a ray of sun comes shining into the concourse, so powerful and tangible you could bang your head on it, if that’s what you wanted to do.”

Hemingway is one persistent influence on Petterson, and so is Knut Hamsun—the protagonists of two early Hamsun novels, “Mysteries” and “Pan,” could be models for Petterson’s unmoored people, especially in the way that Hamsun, like Petterson, at once reveals and obscures rational motivation. But “It’s Fine by Me” reminds us that another influence is the postwar working-class English fiction of writers like Alan Sillitoe and Barry Hines, and the early work of the director Ken Loach, whose young heroes raise a disobedient fist to the established order. For both Audun Sletten and Arvid Jansen, the youthful Albert Finney in “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning” (the 1960 Karel Reisz film made from Sillitoe’s novel of the same title) leads the way forward. Arvid, in “I Curse the River of Time,” recalls that he and his mother shared an admiration for Finney in this role:

My mother liked him a lot too, Albert Finney, when he stood there at his lathe in the bicycle factory right at the start of the film with his shirt sleeves rolled up and bluntly declaimed what he thought of the older workers and the way they were stuck in the mud of the pre-war years and all the things he definitely was not going to waste his life on, and there was no bloody way that he would ever allow himself to be kept down like they had been.

“It’s Fine by Me” is slighter than Petterson’s later work, and comparatively unmenaced by the threat of failure. Audun Sletten, who is all potential, may well not waste his life, as Albert Finney promises not to do. But Arvid Jansen, in “I Curse the River of Time,” does appear to be wasting his life, and seems to have run out of time, though he is only in his late thirties, so that his use of Albert Finney’s imprecations has an inevitably nostalgic air. In general, Petterson’s later novels look back to a historical moment when political action was exciting and necessary, from a present where it has lost its relevance. “Out Stealing Horses” and “To Siberia” circle obsessively around the Second World War, and involve remembered stories of working for the Norwegian and Danish resistance movements, respectively. “To Siberia” has a tremendous description of the arrival of German troops in a Danish town: “Jesper braked, got off his bike, and squatted down to listen. I did the same. What we heard was the future. A faint drone through the cold, a drone that rose without a sign of fading again, an irreversible drone and Jesper straightened up with a shaking body and rubbed his shoulders before he looked out at the coast.” In both “I Curse” and “In the Wake,” the narrators, only in their late thirties and early forties and unnaturally aged, return in their minds to the political possibilities (as well as to the political theatre) of the nineteen-sixties and seventies. Both books quote a passage from Sven Lindqvist’s “The Myth of Wu Tao-tzu,” which seems to function as a kind of lament for the absence of change: “Is social and economic liberation possible without violence? No. Is it possible with violence? No.”

The title of “I Curse the River of Time” is borrowed from one of Mao’s poems, which begins:

Fragile images of departure, the village back then.

I curse the river of time; thirty-two years have passed.

As Arvid explains, the poem is not political but shows a man whose body is battling time, “as I had felt it so often myself; how time without warning could catch up with me and run around beneath my skin like tiny electric shocks.” The novel is set in 1989, and Petterson makes a powerful formal architecture of that year’s political upheavals: as Arvid struggles to breach the wall of his mother’s estrangement or indifference, so the Berlin Wall is coming down and, with it, the final frail rationale of the enormous hopes of European Communism. When he sees a newspaper headline, “THE WALL TUMBLES,” Arvid gets breathless and tearful. “This was bad,” he thinks. “I had not paid attention. . . . Time had passed behind my back and I had not turned to look.”

There is world-historical time, and there is personal time. Stranded on the other side of his familial Rio Grande, he has not noticed how fast the river of historical time has been moving. In Petterson’s fiction, personal retrospect—the ceaseless backward gaze to childhood, to the dominant impress made by one’s parents, to all the remembered pleasure and pain of family history—is both a lure and a hazard. Reverie, dreaming, and memory threaten to immobilize the Petterson protagonist, to take him out of time, to set him drifting in deep waters. When Arvid’s brother, in “In the Wake,” tries to commit suicide, Arvid tells the nurse, “There’s nothing the matter with my brother, he just can’t stop looking back.”

In his interview with the Guardian, Petterson says that he has never doubted that the family is “a centre of writing”; indeed, this centrality is one of the strenuous delights of his fiction. But Petterson’s characters are never quite at the center of their own family life, or at the center of the novels they hoveringly occupy. Haunted by tragedy, stalked by absence, competitive with the dead, yearning for restoration, they experience life as elsewhere.

It is one of the most mysterious effects of these novels, which push the reader sideways, in the manner of an unexpectedly sourceless wind. Like Petterson’s sentences, his heroes are hard to hold on to and yet hard to let go of. Wherever and whenever they announce themselves, they are actually somewhere else, lost in dream. “I ate my lunch standing at the counter still asleep and cycled the whole way to the exchange with my body full of dreams,” the narrator of “To Siberia” says. It’s a characteristic Petterson sentence, beginning in solid realism and ending in lyrical suspension. A body full of dreams is not quite present, and not quite present to the reader. Thus it is that Petterson’s characters often seem to be living two lives, two versions of heroism: the actual and the ideal, the slightly fuzzy present and the sharply etched past.

This anxiety is eloquently voiced in “Out Stealing Horses,” when Trond Sander’s adult daughter confesses to her father that she had always been troubled by the opening sentence of “David Copperfield,” a favorite novel of her father’s: “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anyone else, these pages must show.” To which Trond’s daughter provides a dreamy, anguished commentary that mobilizes all of Petterson’s lingering, sidling power:

I always thought those opening lines were a bit scary because they indicated we would not necessarily be the leading characters of our own lives. I couldn’t imagine how that could come about, something so awful; a sort of ghost-life where I could do nothing but watch that person who had taken my place and maybe hate her deeply and envy her everything, but not be able to do anything about it because at some point in time I had fallen out of my life, as if from an aeroplane, I pictured it, and out into empty space, and there I drifted about and could not get back, and someone else was sitting fastened into my seat, although that place was mine, and I had the ticket in my hand. ♦

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